4-adorning the boudoirs
Now the fun begins!
It is time to dress up our vases and prepare their beds for a hot fiery smokey session in the kiln tomorrow.
As you know I can be a little bit impatient for results so I was very, very tempted to do eight of them at once - stuff them all in - as many saggars as my kiln could hold …..buuuuuuuuuuut …… I have learnt from previous ‘experiments’ I have done in the studio before that if they all don’t work then I’ve destroyed either half /all of my tests and I havent really learnt anything except “don’t do that again!”
So I decided to do two. Both vases relatively same size and shape, short necks, both with terra sig applied. The first vase I was going to fire in the saggar with the combustables around the outside and underneath, the second I was going to fire with exactly the same organics and metals applied and then fire the same combustables within an aluminum foil saggar and then put this inside a terracotta pot saggar.
I am planning to take the kiln up to 750 degrees C - this would have to be measured by the pyrometre and by observation of kiln colour - as I did not have any 018 small cones for my kiln sitter. (I did mention that I had a ‘vintage’ kiln - so no digital programmed controllers here! - and as a natural fire pit also does not have any blue tooth wifi digital controllers this would be as close as I got to the real thing). I have taken some lustres (gold and mother of pearl) up to this low temperature before with stunning effects, but that is another story.. Back to the adornments.
The metals and organics I have chosen are:
Cobalt carbonate …which give off blues (which I love!)
Copper carbonate … which can give off greens, blues, maroons or reds - so we will see!
Old fashioned steel wool (embedded with soap haha!) - which apparently give off blues, greys and pinks …. goodness knows what the soap will do!
Curly wurly steel scrubbers - which I am assuming will be similiar to above but more distinct lines in where it was placed?
Copper wire - can be red, black, whites etc - but from what I’ve seen so far … mainly black ‘smokey lines’
Alpaca wool - spun - mainly used to tie around to hold other things on - but I also soaked in a cobalt carbonate solution
Cotton sheet strips which were soaked in the copper carbonate and cobalt carbonate solution and wrapped around and tied in a bow to hold in place
A very fine florist wire wrapped tightly around a lot of the other material - so not sure if there will be any effect or interaction with the other materials at all
On the vase going inside the aluminium foil I also put a teensy, weensy bit of:
common table salt solution (orange, yellows) and a small section with some pure vitamin E serum… so goodness knows, and of course the aluminium foil itself.
I only put a very very small bit of table salt solution inside the aluminium foil saggar as salt can be highly corrosive to the elements of an electric kiln - so hoping the foil and terracotta pot both contain it. I am also hoping that I may have a little bit of reduction effects happening inside the foil sagger because as the organic material burns it uses up oxygen, leaving an oxygen-less environment which may leave different effects in places.
As you can tell, a lot of ‘hoping’ happens in pottery - it is an advantage for potters to have a very positive mind set!
Next, to put them in their beds. Using sugar cane mulch and fine wood shavings at the base - I then surrounded the pots with a ‘pot pouri’ of dried leafy material. It is fortunate that we are heading into autumn here in South Australia - so I have beautiful dried hybiscus flowers, grapevine leaves, fig tree leaves, grevillea timmings, - all sorts of delectables wrapping around my pots.
Next into the kiln they go!
Having learnt a lot from Jolanda Grint’s book (see Chaper 1 of my blog), the saggar without aluminium foil needed oxygen to combust. So I loaded my two pots into the kiln and placed the shelf on top of them so that they were not fully covered and a small gap / opening was left. I also put the terracotta pots on their saucers - as they had a hole in the bottom, I thought it would help stop the ash from escaping and also help to protect my shelves a bit.
And now we close the door and start the firing and, as all good potters know, … pray to the kiln Gods, as we wait expectantly, with immense eagerness for our reveal, the undress, the performance …